In his Thursday energy/pipeline speech at Cushing, OK, President Obama opened his mouth and revealed a total lack of understanding of our nation’s energy supply picture.

And I’ve been saying for the last few weeks, and I want everybody to understand this, we use 20 percent of the world’s oil; we only produce 2 percent of the world’s oil.

Hmmm. “We only produce 2 percent of the world’s oil” the man said? Seems like that would be pretty easy to check… How about Wikipedia, whose source on world oil production is the CIA World Factbook. (Figures are for crude oil plus natural gas liquids; b/d = barrels per day.)

Russia – 10.5 million b/d, 12.0% of world total

Saudi Arabia – 8.8 million b/d, 10.0% of world total

United States – 7.8 million b/d, 8.9% of world total

Iran – 4.2 million b/d, 4.8% of world total

China – 4.0 million b/d, 4.6% of world total

H/T Andy Dean

I suppose you could give the guy the benefit of the doubt — he was probably going for what I’ve called The Big Energy Lie — the idea that our energy potential is limited because the U.S. has only 2% of the world’s reserves. To me, that’s a deliberate attempt to mislead the public. “Reserves” — an engineering term of art — have no relationship with “resources”, the true estimate of potential.

Our resources are only limited by our ingenuity and our will.

But I truly think that nobody cares. Not the President, his advisors, his speechwriters, or even his trusty teleprompter. After all, there’s an election to win!

Resources, reserves, production . . . As a famous man once said, “Words. Just words.”

4 Responses to Obama’s Big Energy Gaffe

You weren’t kicked off for disagreeing with me. You were kicked off for reregistering under a different name after having been booted before. If this is a mistake, please plead your case at contact@redstate.com.

What’s to refute? You put a lot of stock in an EIA study that says that supply is not particularly important to price. I don’t. We disagree. That won’t keep me awake at night.

In 2008, the oil price went from $145 to $35 after a couple of million barrels a day of demand evaporated. I don’t recall EIA anticipating that.

(Thus demonstrating that) Price is very sensitive to demand. As I’ve said many times, the market functions best when there’s 1-2 million barrels a day of production capability overhanging the market. Incremental production over that has little value, and in fact a carrying cost as it must be stored. (As the above example shows, the same thing happens if demand suddenly erodes.) If that margin gets eroded, the incremental barrel gets bid up wildly because it is so valuable.

Presidents since Nixon have perceived domestic supply to be important, except for Mr. Obama. I agree with the majority.

Furthermore, I believe it to be important to our security and to the consumer price that the U.S. be taken seriously by other producing countries. They laugh at us when we ask them to ramp up production when we are unwilling to drill at home.

OK, I hope that’s clear. Let’s agree to disagree.

As for the banning issue, you were banned from RedState because being a retread is a violation of site rules. You seem to acknowledge that you are a “retread”. If you have a complaint, take it up with contact@redstate.com.

“Troll” seems to have caused great offense. To me, your comments at RS (and here) are trollish because they belabor one point, and you demand to be engaged in an argument, well beyond the point where I’ve made my position clear.